The dancers of Scottish Ballet have a great deal to smile about as they celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary this season. Their superb, purpose-built new headquarters opened recently at the Tramway international arts centre, in Glasgow, and they have won much acclaim since Ashley Page became director in 2002 and restored the adventurous spirit that used to be there in the formative, pioneering years under their founder-director, Peter Darrell.

“Carmen” also was one of the company’s most popular ballets two years ago and one of the biggest financial successes.

“It was a sellout in 2007, and we even had to turn away people from the Sunday matinee,” said Whitener, who choreographed the production. “So we’re hoping they’ll come back this time around.”

Artistic inspiration can be elusive, especially under the pressure of a deadline and the limitations of a commission. Luckily, Robert Weiss and J. Mark Scearce can produce a lot in a short time.

Working since mid-July, Weiss, Carolina Ballet's artistic director, and composer Scearce, head of the music department at N.C. State University, have been tapping their final surges of creativity for the company's program premiering Thursday. On display will be ballets commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in connection with its current exhibit, "Picasso and the Allure of Language."

Eugene Ballet wanted the costumes for a series of performances that begin this Saturday. Ballet Idaho is not using the outfits this season, but is storing them.

The lawsuit, which seeks $91,000, says Eugene Ballet was forced to spend nearly $20,000 at the last minute to create eight new costumes and modify others.

The Eugene Ballet Company has gone to court, saying that Ballet Idaho refused to turn over costumes it needed for performances of "The Sleeping Beauty."

The costumes are jointly owned by the two companies. But in its lawsuit filed last week, Eugene Ballet says the Boise-based troupe refused to ship the outfits to Oregon unless Eugene Ballet agreed to rent them or buy out Ballet Idaho's interest in them.

Once upon a time, the two ballet companies had more of a fairy tale relationship. For 14 years beginning in 1994, both contributed dancers to a joint troupe that performed under the artistic direction of Eugene Ballet co-founder Toni Pimble. That relationship ended in 2008, when Ballet Idaho hired a new artistic director, Peter Anastos.

In an interview with Dance magazine earlier this year, Ballet Idaho executive director Julie Numbers Smith said the collaboration with Pimble and Eugene Ballet had helped her company “develop an audience and donor base.” She said the decision to part ways was based on the Boise company’s desire “to build a truly local resident company.”

In Oregon Ballet Theatre's 20th anniversary season opener, the dancers, performing a program headed by George Balanchine's elegant, eloquent "Emeralds" -- followed by excerpts from, count them, nine other ballets -- delivered the technical skill, stylistic versatility and eclectic musicality the evening demanded, and then some.

"Emeralds," Balanchine's homage to French ballet, contains the hallmarks of his work -- complex floor patterns for the corps; precise, delicate footwork; unembellished movement of the arms and hands -- but Fauré's lushly romantic music slows it down, and the ballet carries an atypical dreamy, elegiac quality that's hard to pull off.

Twenty years after its birth – and four months after its near-death experience and recent internal shake up–Oregon Ballet Theatre has kicked off its ’09-10 season with the Emerald Retrospective program. The Keller Auditorium was mostly full on opening night, as it was in June, when OBT brought in the local and national dance cavalry for its United We Dance benefit, which attracted enough attention and cash to stave off financial collapse.

This retrospective serves as a kind of family album, beginning with a film montage tracing OBT’s history through photos, press clippings and performance snippets. The program’s first half is devoted to Emeralds, one third of George Balanchine’s 1967 plotless ballet Jewels. Emeralds is a dance party set in a ballroom whose castle has gone missing — it has none of the shape-shifting sorcery of story ballets, just lyrical movement patterns and a stately mood set by costume designer Karinska’s lush green tutus and sparkling gems. OBT handles this mostly genteel affair well, particularly Yuka Iino, who stretches out certain counts just long enough to keep things interesting.

But it is academic dance, and it's not just a pun to say there are principles of academic freedom involved. Is Ketinoa's channel protected under principles of academic freedom? Or rather, should it be? The dance world has languished so long without libraries, and the rise of video was just beginning to allow dance to be studied like literature, so you could study it and quote accurately, and the autodidact or amateur outside the academy was becoming almost as well informed as some professors. Though it was happening outside a university setting, the growth of serious dance culture was happening in the West rather like the scientific societies of the 18th century, when professional procedures had not yet been codified but people were making collections and study was becoming possible on an unprecedented scale -- and Ketinoa's channel was at the top of the heap for providing the core commentaries and syllabi.